A Critical Approach to Abnormality 237to professionals themselves. We then trace a brief history of
deinstitutionalization movements across systems of mental health care,
narrowing in on some reasons why they, and the anti-psychiatry movement
more broadly (see Nasser, 1995), have failed to fully achieve their original
egalitarian goals. Situating these topics within broader social concerns like
globalization and technological automation, we argue that any attempt to
understand the reasons and means by which people suffer today must
account for the evolution of colonial practices through the use of new
social tools and emerging economic markets. Drawing on recent
developments in this vein, we chart several emerging alternatives to
conventional, ‘Western’ notions of abnormality and mental disorder. As
we will see, many of these focus on the power of social networks through
the reworking of suffering and care as group and community oriented
processes that occur beyond the scope of any single individual.
COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CONCEPT
OF ABNORMALITY
As writers like Michel Foucault (1977) and Frantz Fanon (2017) have
sufficiently shown, psychiatry has, from its inception, provided
instruments to Western governments for purposes of disciplining the
mental and physical lives of those who diverge from social norms. To
illustrate this, one would need to look no further than the historical waste
bin of what are now considered obsolete psychiatric diagnoses. There is,
for example, drapetomania—the “runaway slave syndrome”—as well as
the various iterations of female hysteria that have been used to pathologize
a range of otherwise normal emotions in women. And just as recently as
DSM-II, sexual orientation disturbance was used to pathologize all non-
heteronormative sexual relationships (see Drescher, 2015). In a similar
vein, Western psychiatry has long served as a sociopolitical tool for
governments around the world to impose authoritarian rule over dissidents
in their own territories as well as those encountered through at times